Using Alioth for Packaging. Raphaël Hertzog [5]provided[6]documentation on maintaining Debian packages via [7]Alioth. Forsingle packages the [8]collab-maint project is probably sufficient.Maintaining a set of related packages is best done by a new dedicatedproject and Subversion configured to send commit notifications to thepackage tracking system.

Google Summer of Code 2006. Google is organising a [9]Summer of Codeevent like last year. This is a program where Google sponsors thecreation and future development of open source software. PetterReinholdtsen [10]asked whether Debian should participate and set up anWiki [11]page were ideas for Debian-related projects are collected.Anthony Towns [12]approved this and applied for the Debian project.

Debian from Scratch. John Goerzen [13]informed about the availabilityof a new release of the Debian From Scratch [14]CD. With this CD it ispossible to install a Debian system in a Gentoo fashioned manner bycompiling the programs just before installing them. This CD alsooffers a fully functional rescue system with a lot of filesystemtools, backup and repair utilities, administrative tools and so on.

Upgrade Conflict: Kernel and GRUB. Bastian Blank [15]pointed outanticipated problems with regards to the kernel and [16]grub whenupgrading from [17]sarge to [18]etch since the new [19]kernel-package[20]utilises [21]debconf for user interaction. He asserted that grubneeds to be updated before the kernel image.

Properly Closing old resolved Bug Reports. Adam Majer [22]wondered ifit is appropriate to close old resolved bugs with the most recentchangelog entry if they were fixed with an older upload already.Matthew Palmer [23]confirmed that a changelog entry should onlydocument the changes and resolved bugs in this particular upload.

Removing Mozilla. Andreas Metzler [24]reported that current release ofMozilla is the last and that it isn't supported upstream anymore.Hence, it should be [25]removed from the Debian distribution as well.All functionality that is needed to embed gecko and friends has beenmoved to [26]xulrunner on which these packages should depend upon. Theinterface shouldn't have changed, so that the conversion should befairly simple.

Project Leader Bits. Anthony Towns [27]reported that he has addedSteve McIntyre as “Second In Charge” to share some of the regularproject leader responsibilities. Manoj Srivastava has kindly agreed tocontinue as project secretary for another year, and is eager to dosome more work on the devotee scripts.

AMD64 added to the Etch. Anthony Towns [28]reported that the [29]AMD64architecture has been added to the [30]etch release. It should bepossible to bootstrap this architecture at this point and it onlylacks X. From now on developers with AMD64 machines are able to uploadnew versions of their packages built locally. AMD64 is also nowincluded in the [31]buildd [32]graphs.

Orphaned Packages. 17 packages were orphaned this week and require anew maintainer. This makes a total of 302 orphaned packages. Manythanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the FreeSoftware community. Please see the [52]WNPP pages for the full list,and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if youplan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian communityand report about what is going on. Please see the [81]contributingpage to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving yourmail at [82]dwn@debian.org.